Engineering manager - Network infrastructure

The Role
We're looking for an Engineering Manager for Network Infrastructure to own delivery of network infrastructure initiatives in APAC. This is not a role for someone who only coordinates tickets and status. It is a role for someone with an engineering skeleton: a person who has built, operated, broken and recovered things, and can earn the trust of SREs, SWEs, network engineers, and security and platform teams. We are at the early stage of our APAC expansion, so at first you will be hands-on: reviewing designs, stepping into incidents, and writing code or automation when the team needs it, with a high degree of independence from the European teams. As the organisation grows, the scope of the role will grow with it.

You own delivery. You will make important cross-team initiatives land: defining scope, aligning owners, exposing risks, driving decisions, tracking dependencies, and making sure we ship useful outcomes instead of half-finished initiatives. The job is not done when the technical pieces exist. It is done when engineers trust the tool, the NOC actually uses the workflow, alerts are actionable, runbooks are real, and the new way becomes the default way.

You stay technical. You don't need to be the deepest expert in every area, but you should be technical enough to understand real trade-offs: why rollback is not optional, why "just automate it" can create a bigger blast radius, why SLOs without ownership are decoration, and why network device CI/CD is very different from deploying a stateless service. You can read a design doc, challenge missing assumptions, notice unclear failure modes, and help the team turn a vague but important problem into an executable plan.

This is a high-leverage role in an early-stage and fast-scaling network infrastructure organisation. Many important systems are being built now: automation, observability, reliability standards, provisioning flows, operational safety, and cross-site consistency. You won't be maintaining a mature machine from the sidelines. You'll help shape how the machine works.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Set the engineering bar: code quality, design review, on-call and incident management practices, and operational standards
• Own end-to-end delivery of cross-team network infrastructure initiatives in APAC, from a vague problem statement to an executable plan to adoption
• Define scope and success criteria, align owners across SRE, SWE, network, security, platform and data center teams, and drive decisions to closure
• Review designs and technical proposals, challenge missing assumptions, and surface failure modes, dependencies and risks early
• Stay hands-on where it matters: step into incidents, write code or automation, and unblock the team
• Drive adoption: make sure tools and workflows become the default way of working, with real documentation, runbooks and feedback loops
• Keep stakeholders, including the European teams, informed with clear, honest status and coordinate across time zones
• Turn operational pain and engineering input into a clear, prioritized backlog

We expect you to have:

• 7+ years of experience in software, SRE, network or infrastructure engineering, including experience leading cross-team technical initiatives
• A real engineering background: you have built and operated production systems and can earn the trust of deeply technical teams
• Ability to read design docs and technical proposals, understand trade-offs, and ask sharp questions about reliability, rollback, blast radius and failure modes
• Strong understanding of infrastructure fundamentals (Linux, networking, automation, CI/CD) at the level needed to hold your own in technical discussions
• Proven ability to drive decisions and create clarity in ambiguous, fast-changing environments
• Excellent written and verbal communication, including documenting plans and decisions and influencing smart technical people
• Ability to work independently in an early-stage environment and to build processes from scratch
• Professional working proficiency in English (spoken and written) and comfort working across time zones

It will be an added bonus if you have:

• Experience with network infrastructure: network automation, observability, or network device lifecycle management
• Experience with SLO/SLI frameworks, incident management, or production readiness processes
• Experience with CI/CD or change management for network or other high-blast-radius infrastructure
• Experience building a team from scratch or launching a new engineering hub
• Experience with secrets and access management, firmware rollout or fleet-wide operational initiatives
• Hands-on engineering contributions (code, tooling, automation) alongside management work
• Knowledge of the APAC network landscape (carriers, IX, regional connectivity and regulatory specifics)

Examples of initiatives your team may own:

• A user and secrets management system for network infrastructure, including robot-user lifecycle, safe key/password rotation, revocation, break-glass access, mixed agent/push-based device support, and integration with existing secrets backends
• An SLO framework for network services and components, including SLIs, SLOs, dashboards, alerts, ownership, tiering, and a clear link between reliability targets and engineering investment
• CI/CD for network devices, where configuration changes, validation, staged rollout, rollback, and blast-radius control become disciplined and repeatable instead of manual and risky
• Fleet-wide operational initiatives such as firmware consistency, device lifecycle hygiene, observability coverage, monitoring quality, alert ownership, or production readiness for new network capabilities